


What We Buried

by Spark_Writer



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, M/M, Pining Sherlock, Teenlock, Unrequited Love, relationships are complicated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1809640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spark_Writer/pseuds/Spark_Writer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’ve always been, always will be, so very desperately unspoken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

It’s gotten to the point where they barely breathe around each other.

 

Or, when they do, when do they manage to draw enough oxygen to stop feeling like they’re drowning, it’s to fling insults at each other, white hot and hysterical.

 

Neither of them even cares about this cracked, gristly thing anymore. They’ve known each other too long. There’s too much history. Too much has been said. Too much has been unsaid. There’s no reason for them to even entertain hopes of a different outcome. This, what they have together; it makes Sherlock cold and haunted and he wants away from it. It’s time to flee to higher ground, where no clammy hands can grab at his ankles and pull him back into the grey.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

John kisses him.

 

It’s a Tuesday night and fireflies are waltzing around them in blue shadows.

 

Sherlock puts his hands on John’s shoulders and pushes him back. He exhales shakily—laughs, even, because he nauseous with shock and tragedy.

 

“You can’t be seri—“

 

“Sherlock, don’t,” pleads John, inching across the nubby rub on his knees, reaching out cup Sherlock’s cheekbone with one callused palm.

 

It’s not romantic.

 

“Get off me,” he spits, twisting away from John’s touch.

 

“Sherlock—“

 

“It was you who said you didn’t want this.”

 

“I was fourteen, I didn’t know anything.”

 

Sherlock is going to vomit. He says, “Get out,” voice low and trembling like a love poem.

 

“Please, just. Listen.”

 

“No.”

 

“We need to talk.”

 

“What, are you breaking up with me? Oh, right, we’re not actually in a relationship, nor do I wish to be in one.”

 

“That may have been what I was going to talk to you about.”

 

“May have been?”

 

“We could talk about the fucking weather instead.”

 

He doesn’t care either way.

 

He just wants John _gone_.

 

“Fine, you know what, Sherlock, for once I’m going to do as you ask.” John scrambles up from the floor and jams his bare feet into his shoes.

 

“Fuck you, John,” Sherlock says numbly, but it’s a mere whimper compared to the bloody churn of agony in his gut.

 

Now he understands why storms are named after people.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

They are seventeen and no longer believe in magic.

 

They’re children making the descent into adulthood, sinking down from the most exquisite high, hot air balloons with no fuel left. They are coming back to earth, and it hurts, it hurts, _oh._

 

Sherlock lights another cigarette.


	4. Chapter 4

 

The thing is, John used to laugh and laugh and laugh, making Sherlock erupt into ineloquent chuckles of his own, and they’d lean together, breaths staining each other’s skin. Now he avoids making conversation or eye contact of any kind.

 

Sherlock can’t blame him. He’s been kind of a bastard.

 

But then, so has John.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

“Peter Pan had something, I think.”

 

 

It’s the first thing John has said to him in nine days. He inhales, exhales, scrapes his tongue along his bottom molars. “You do know the original story behind Peter Pan, right? It’s not some idyllic tale about flying and wonderland and never growing older. Peter is a murderer. He kills people when they grow up.”

 

“Well, that’s right up your street.”

 

“What, sadistic fairytales?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I suppose you’re right.”

 

John blinks at him. Sherlock is suddenly, desperately aware of the dirt under his fingernails. He stifles the urge to pick it away whilst cursing John for rousing in him such a feeling of vulnerability, of nakedness.

 

“Bet that was hard to admit.”

 

“Only slightly.” Sherlock stands, brushing dirt from his trousers. “I’ve got violin.”

 

“Oh, right. See you.”

 

He leaves John beneath the poplar with a mouth full of acid and broken glass.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

Summer is warm and rainy with the occasional shard of sunlight.

 

Sherlock wakes from dreams of John precisely eight times. Three times he finds himself wet and sticky, which is entirely inappropriate, two times his pillow is damp, and once he wakes to find himself curled into a ball of anguish near the edge of the mattress. It’s absurd. Not to mention pathetic. He studies John’s mobile number during daylight hours and doesn’t call, putters about the house thinking only of smoke in his lungs and thin lips moving against his own mouth, punches Mycroft’s old stuffed penguin until it wobbles and careens across the cellar into the wall.

 

He is _such_ a teenager, and then he isn’t.

 

In the end, he really isn’t.


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

“Let’s go out,” says John. His voice sounds tinny the way it carries across miles of phone line.

 

“Out,” repeats Sherlock.

 

“Yes, out. To a pub or something. Get drinks and have a chat.”

 

“I didn’t realise we had a tradition of ‘getting drinks and having chats.’”

 

“Sod off. Yes or no?”

 

“We really shouldn’t.” Sherlock plays with the rubber shrouded wire, the last land line his family is in possession of.

 

“So it’s a yes,” John says, laughing, and hell, he does know Sherlock.

 

“Meet me at eight o’clock tonight.”

 

“Where?”

 

“Bogie’s.”

 

“Brilliant. Oh, and promise to keep the talk of corpses and cadavers to a decent minimum, alright? I’m not really in the mood.”

 

“We’ll see.” Sherlock grins into his fist and hangs up before John has time to protest.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

They drink sour whiskey until the moon is high overhead.

 

“Sherlock,” says John, as they stumble out of the pub onto lonely pavement. It comes out slurred and warm; the backs of their hands brush together. And again, more reverently, “ _Sherlock_.”

 

“What, John?” Sherlock rolls his eyes, clinging to the last vestiges of sarcasm that remain in his state of intoxication.

 

“Exactly what are we doing?”

 

“I’d assume you know the answer to that question better than I. You’re the one who initiated this.”

 

“No, I mean…” John gesticulates grandly. “In a larger sense.”

 

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you are getting at.” Of course he does. He’s Sherlock fucking Holmes, he knows precisely what John’s getting at; the warning bells are clanging high and clear, mixing with an echoed blare of irritated reluctance. Haven’t they already been over this? Is it truly necessary to ‘put all the cards on the table,’ as Greg always says? He swallows hard. Twice.

 

“Sherlock.”

 

“Is that all you’re capable of saying?” A cab blazes past, throwing them into the momentary brilliance of its headlights.

 

“Sherlock, don’t.” John stops dead and glares at him, forced to tilt his face at a forty-five degree angle to look him in the eye. “Stop playing dumb.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

“You bloody are.”

 

“Fuck off. We’ve been over this.”

 

“Yeah? What exactly have we been over?”

 

Sherlock fiddles with his scarf, nauseated. “This. Us. I’ve told you I want no part of it.”

 

“You’re a fucking liar.”

 

“I’m lots of things, John. A liar isn’t one of them. I meant what I said. I can’t think of anything I want less.”

 

John looks terrifying, all pale fire and heartache. His jaw clenches, unclenches. He exhales. “Then we ought to stop seeing each other at all. No-one likes beating a dead horse.”

 

The reply comes frighteningly effortlessly. “So be it.”

 

They look at each other. Cars pass. “You,” John breathes, “were my best mate, you know that.”

 

“Yes.”

 

They say nothing else after that. They’ve always been, always will be, so very desperately unspoken.

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

 

“I didn’t love him,” Sherlock mutters and presses his face into the mattress; thinks wistfully of suffocation, of death.

 

“Yes, you did. Do.”

 

The shift to present tense is what makes him want to flay the skin from his brother’s bones. He grits his teeth.

 

“I’m never wrong, Sherlock.”

 

“Go to hell.”

 

So Mycroft stops leaning against the door frame and slips away, strangely light-footed for someone of his girth.

 

“I didn’t,” Sherlock repeats, emphatic in the silence of his bedroom. “I did not.”

 

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

Autumn comes in with fiery breath and golden eyes. Sherlock smokes beneath the poplar and reflects upon the fact that even this sorrow does not compare to the pain of trying to force a platonic relationship when that is plainly not your destiny. He rests his back against the bark and closes his eyes against the maddening bustle of human life. He thinks of pistols and stab wounds, chemical elements and planetary bodies, but he doesn’t think of John Watson. Not once.

 

He used to wonder if, on his side of town, John was thinking of him; aching for him the way he did John. He doesn’t do that anymore. The flight of butterflies no longer takes off in his midsection at the thought.

 

Like everything else in his life, they are dead and buried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

 

 

The years spin giddily past.

 

Mycroft grows ever more insufferable. Sherlock goes to Uni with a mind full of ragged edges and adrenaline. That’s where he meets Victor Trevor, a flax haired young man from two doors down.

 

“Sherlock Holmes,” says Victor, rolling the moniker round his mouth, tasting it. He smiles broadly and pulls Sherlock into his room by the wrist. “Let’s get to know each other, shall we?”

 

It’s immediately clear Victor is not the sort of person who gets to know people over coffee and scones. He shows Sherlock the posters adorning his walls: technicolour beauties printed with falling meteors and suns light years away.

 

“In all the eons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing,” he explains and stands with his shoulder pressed hard against Sherlock’s. “Not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.”

 

“Brilliant,” says Sherlock, light headed.

 

Victor lays his palms on the back of Sherlock’s neck and contemplates him. He does not aim right for Sherlock’s mouth, but first his forehead, pressing a kiss where his hairline begins so gently it tickles. Sherlock inhales, almost a gasp, and _then_ Victor brushes their lips together.

 

He’s only been kissed once before. Fireflies, dusk, John.

 

This time is different.

 

“You’re a quick study,” Victor pants, and Sherlock winds his arms around his waist.

 

“So I’ve been told.”

 

“And here I was thinking you had only a theoretical knowledge.”

 

“Shut up,” says Sherlock and pushes closer. “I’ve got a practical knowledge of a good many things.”

 

“Such as?” Victor sucks at his bottom lip and he inexorably thinks of John.

 

“I can, _ah,_ operate a hand gun rather well.”

 

“Oh, fuck,” breathes Victor. Says, “You’re just my type.”

 

 

 


End file.
